And what’s right with President Obama?

The British have a saying about the twin rules of journalism: first simplify, then exaggerate.

Perhaps Barack Obama can comfort himself with the reality that his current travails are both more complicated in their causes and less dire in their consequences than they are being portrayed in the Washington echo chamber.

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John Harris, Todd Purdum analysis

The other side: What’s wrong with Obama?

There is a useful cautionary note for everyone who is prone to withering judgments about Obama’s stumbling performances in recent weeks: No institution in American life is more resilient than the modern presidency, and no politician talented enough to capture the office should ever be underestimated.

Bill Clinton, of course, is the supreme example. He was counted out after a clumsy start in 1993, after losing the House in 1994, after a sex scandal in 1998, and, as a new ex-president, after a pardon scandal in 2001.

Barack Obama is a man of different talents, instincts and interests than Clinton. But now that Washington is in pile-on mode — including us — it’s not a bad time to remember that there are some reasons why he is among the most talented politicians of his generation.

Recent bad headlines have not diluted his enduring personal and political assets, and, so long as he occupies the White House, there is no other person with more power to set the national agenda.

In that spirit, here’s a roster of what’s still right with Obama:

• His personality

No one will ever mistake Obama for warm and fuzzy. But when he tries even a bit, he can’t help being winning. His smile remains dazzling, even if he flashes it less often.

His adversaries are implacable, but a critical mass of Americans still like to feel better about themselves because they feel good about Obama, just as they did when they elected him twice. The public understands that the president’s biggest structural political problems are not of his making, and none of the setbacks of the second term have altered the fact that people basically like the guy.

A Gallup Organization survey this summer found that three-quarters of Americans saw Obama likeable, while 55 percent rated him as honest and trustworthy, and nearly six in 10 said that he understands the problems Americans face.

Throughout last year’s reelection, the Obama campaign’s internal surveys showed that the very quality that so many Washington insiders now complain about — that the president is not much of a politician — was one that most endeared him to the public.

Though the trend lines are not as steady this year as they have typically been in the past, Obama’s favorability rating has largely stayed above water in major public opinion surveys, with a recent Fox News telephone poll clocking his favorability at 50 percent, to 46 percent unfavorable.

• His normality

The presidency has long attracted neurotic personality types, but Obama is not among them. He has a healthy ego, but his longstanding ability to coolly assess his circumstances and then adapt to them means that he is still better positioned than most of his peers to work his way out of problems.

He has always been best with his back against the wall. He may not be Harry Truman or Jerry Ford, taking brisk walks about town or toasting his own English muffins, but it’s hard to imagine that he would ever slide into LBJ-style meltdown or Nixonian paranoia.

His wife and daughters — and their nightly family dinners above the store — may put a crimp in his Washington social life and his willingness to wine and dine allies or enemies, but they doubtless keep him an honest dad. In his first campaign and throughout the troubles of his tenure, he has kept perspective, often telling David Axelrod, “If things don’t work out, I’ve already got a pretty good gig being Barack Obama.”

Like Truman, who called his wife, Bess, “The Boss,” Obama makes it clear that divided opinion on topics like Syria starts in his own backyard. “I’m taking this vote in Congress and what the American people are saying very seriously,” he said last week. “Because if you ask somebody, you know, I read polls like everybody else. And if you ask somebody, if you ask Michelle, ‘Do we want to be involved in another war?’ the answer is no.”

• His enemies

Simply put, Obama’s positions on the issues are vastly more popular than the extreme views of his die-hard opponents in Congress and the right-wing echo chamber.

Ronald Reagan showed what an asset this could be, withstanding the withering condescension of the left because he had the folks in the middle. Newt Gingrich (sort of) learned the same lesson in reverse in his dealings with Bill Clinton. Has Ted Cruz? Not so much.

Americans’ views of Congress, driven down in the summer of 2011 over the last debt-ceiling standoff, “have never recovered,” a Pew Research Center survey reported this summer. Just 21 percent of Americans said they regarded the institution favorably (a level that Sen. John McCain said to “paid staff and blood relatives”). Pew found that the Republican brand is also faring miserably, with a 33 percent national favorability rating “among the most negative ratings for the party in 20 years of polling.”